A Meeting in Meridian

He wouldn't come out of his cell.  I traveled all the way there, stayed in a hotel, had a friend take off work to go with me, and he wouldn't come out of his cell.

This was the one variable that I had not prepared myself for.  The paperwork was processed.  We went through the crazy security process, where the guards were sure to subtly remind us over and over again that they could curtail our visit.  In the end, just when I knew we'd jumped through all the hoops, word came down from his floor that he would not see me, he would not come out of his cell.

I don't know if it's a game or fear or maybe something else.  I felt stupid.  I put myself in a position with him where he had the power.  I gave him that and he used it.  Maybe he was afraid.  He hasn't had a visitor in years.  I want to have sympathy for him and to assume the best, but I'm not there yet.  I'm angry and sad.  I promised myself that no matter how things went that day, that I would let go of this piece of the puzzle, I would stop looking so closely at the murder.  I said that when I thought I would see him.

I'm still on the fence about next steps.  I'm focusing on other things...working on other chapters...pulling my book together without the answers I was hoping for.

I want to write to him to ask what happened.  But I wonder why he hasn't written to me to tell me.  I don't want to be in relationship with a mad man, with the man who shattered my family with a blast of pellets.  I feel like I started something that I want to stop, but can't.  I feel like a fool.

Silence

I’ve been silent because I know that I need to write about what happened when I went to see Cork.  I can’t write about that, yet.  That’s it.  I’ve written down the details, but nothing else.  They’re waiting on my laptop for me to revisit them and bring them to life with more details and a description of my emotions.  I just can’t to it, yet.  That’s the story. 

Guilt

I keep writing about this meeting that I’m going to have on Sunday because I feel numb every time I think about it and in my mind, feeling numb means covering something up.  I think, or I hope, that in these writings I am getting closer to the core of what’s eating at me.

Last night I was sitting on a friend’s couch trying to find the words to describe my apprehension.  Whenever I express concern about going, people usually remind me that there will be guards, etc.  But I’m not afraid that Cork will harm me.  Deep, deep down I feel a certainty that when I sit across from him I will be assaulted, not by him, but by a suffocating sadness. 

Cork started getting arrested when he was 14.  The first time was because he’d stolen pots from a department store and was caught trying to sell them.  He was extremely poor.  I often wonder what he was going to buy with that money.  Drugs weren’t prevalent in Greenwood back then.  I keep thinking that maybe he was just hungry.  Maybe he needed money for food.  Maybe he needed help instead of punishment.

By the time he was 22 he’d been arrested 18 times, and then he killed Booker Wright.  He went to jail, then prison, and has been incarcerated for the last 39 years.  What kind of a life is that?  What bothers me about our visit is that I don’t really care about him, and I don’t think that anyone else does either.  I'm meeting with because I want to take something from him, his memories. 

I will walk in there with my Nordstrom jeans on, and sit across for him for as long as it pleases me to do so, then I will leave and never look back.  I will step into this life of loss and tragedy for my own gain.  What will it be like to sit across from someone who hasn’t been able to spend their time how they want to, or hop in a car and go for a drive on a whim?  It’s like realizing all of a sudden that I am coated with a putrid, nose-burning, un-concealable stench of privilege.  I wonder if this is what white guilt feels like. 

This Sunday

I've been quiet lately.  I've been telling myself for a few days that I need to blog before my next trip.  Really, there's only one thing going on right now, one topic to write about.  This Sunday I will share a table with the man who blasted a hole into my grandfather and our family as well.

This past week I distracted myself by trying to see if I could get cameras in to film my meeting with Cork.  Three state representatives and two state senators called the Mississippi State Commissioner on my behalf.  The final answer was no. Then I was writing or working hard to build Booker's Place. I've also been setting up interviews with more people who knew my grandfather.  I found the guy who worked as a DJ at Booker's restaurant.  I've been volunteering at my kids' school, shopping for groceries, watching A LOT of The Walking Dead (which, by the way, presents some really complex questions about what it means to lose ones sense of humanity), and so on.

What I have not done is thought about what's going to happen this Sunday.

Someone asked me today how one prepares to meet the man who murdered their grandfather in cold blood.  I said, "I don't know.  I guess this is how I prepare, I don't."  I have hopes for what may come of my meeting with him, but no expectations.

I hope he tells me the whole truth.  I hope he provides the monumental final piece to my grandfather's murder story, the piece that will complete the picture so that I can finally make sense of it.  But maybe there is no making sense of death, especially murder.

I know I won't get "closure."  I don't think I even like that word anymore.  It sounds like a place to stand, a perspective from which one can observe, from a distance, a devastating hurt and examine it without emotion.

The raw intensity of the feelings are gone.  The loud blast, the shattering glass, the blood that pooled on the floor, all of it gone.  Left in its wake is supposed to be a peaceful silence.  A hazy, sepia-toned version of the memory.  One that brings back only a faded replica of what once was, with none of the hard hitting, vivid color of it all.

But with closure, I lose him.  These feelings are all I have to connect me to him.  Solving his murder, or finding out whether or not it even needs to be solved, sometimes seems like the only gift I can give to him.  The logical side of me says that my children are a gift to him.  Every time I speak about him to a crowd of students I am planting a seed of him and that is a gift as well.

Sometimes I feel stupid about this whole murder question.  At times the answers have been clear, like a face on the other side of a freshly cleaned piece of glass.  Then a bit of dirt gets kicked up and I can't quite see the answer anymore, but I remember it and I'm holding to it tight.  Then mud is splashed on the glass and suddenly the answer is ripped from my sight.  Thankfully, someone cleans the glass.  I look through it excitedly only to find a different answer, someone else's face staring back at me.  Each new face seems less real than the one before it.  I can't seem to get as excited as I was the first time.  I wonder if, after I meet with Cork, I will look through that glass again only to find that no one is there at all.

Murder Theories Abound

As if I wasn't already chasing a multitude of leads, last night someone gave me something else to think about. First let me say that a lot of people believe that Lloyd Cork was hired to do what he did.  Primarily because Booker was notorious for kicking people out of his club if they were acting up or simply didn't have the money to buy anything.  This simple fact was common knowledge.  The idea that he would go in there, act up, and get kicked out smells fishy to a lot of Greenwood locals.

I've been told a few ideas about who may have hired Cork to do it and why.  I've also been given another idea about why would Cork himself would be motivated to commit murder and maybe he thought that getting thrown out (Booker hit him with the butt of his gun) would provide him with some sort of defense.

Last night I was presented with another idea.  A few days (either two or three) before Booker was shot, something terrible happened in a small town not too far from Greenwood.  Booker's half brother committed  a triple homicide.  He killed a prominent business owner, his daughter and his his sister.  Booker's half brother was on the run when Booker was shot.  Last night, someone who lived in Greenwood then and continues to live there now, someone who was very, very close to Booker - told me that they always thought that Cork was hired to murder Booker as revenge for the triple homicide committed by Booker's half-brother.

I guess I have one more question to ask Cork when I sit across from him in a week and a half.

A Killing at the Grill

There's a restaurant in Greenwood (NOT Lusco's) that, for many blacks, was the primary symbol of segregation during the movement.  It's still open today and is one of only a handful of sit down restaurants that even offers lunch in Greenwood. Nevertheless, most Greenwood blacks have never eaten there.

During the making of Booker's Place: A Mississippi Story, Raymond De Felitta and I interviewed a woman named Marie Tribitt, a childhood friend of Booker's.  Marie told us the story of a man who was most likely mentally disabled.  He had a job cleaning floors at this whites' only establishment in Greenwood decades ago. According to Marie, one day the man was mopping the floor and he accidentally touched a white woman's foot with his mop.  The woman became very angry. Later that day, the man was shot dead.

Many of my white friends from Greenwood have been angered by this story and the fact that it was included in the film at all.  They've never heard it and don't believe that something like that could ever have happened in their town.  I was on the fence about it until Thursday night.

I just got back from Greenwood where I screened Booker's Place: A Mississippi Story, at MVSU, the local state university there.  A black man stood up and recalled the challenges he'd faced while living in Greenwood when segregation was upheld by the police.  He told a story of something that happened when he was nine years old.  A black man was in this same restaurant and he was mopping the floor.  He spilled a little water on the foot of a white woman, who then became irate. Someone tried to calm her down, tell her that it was an accident, that he meant no harm, and that it was just a little water.  She could not be soothed.  Later that night the man with the mop was murdered.

Sometimes I think there are two Mississippis.  Otherwise, half the people talking to me must be liars.  I'm not a god, I have no magic, I cannot discern a lie from the truth when the story is older than I am.  Sometimes people argue that if there is no record, then there was no crime.  However, the Greenwood library is filled with white history and almost completely void of black history.  Finding public photos of Greenwood blacks from the 1950s and earlier doing anything other than hanging from a tree is almost impossible.  If there is no record of them, then were there no blacks in Greenwood at all?

Sadly, the police rarely investigated the murders of poor black men in Greenwood unless pressured to do so by outside forces.  The idea that this man lost his life in such a way, for such a simple mistake seems absurd to many whites in Greenwood and completely plausible to many blacks.

What does that tell us?  Beyond this story, what does that say?  Blacks remember, with a clarity that cannot be compromised, that there was a time when their lives were worthless to the white people in their community.  Whites remember their parents feeling trapped and not knowing how to navigate in the segregated society that a strong few wanted to keep in place.  Whose version of Mississippi shall prevail?  Whose truth is the Truth?

I tend to think that both are true, depending on which side of the river you grew up on.  If I say this murder didn't happen because I cannot prove it, then that means that countless black murders that were never investigated also didn't happen.  If I say I believe it because two sources recall it, then I am following fanatics who want to exacerbate the problems of the past to justify the troubles of today.

I am not a judge.  I am a woman in search of the stories that shaped the world my grandfather lived in.  If blacks believed that stories like this were true, whether or not they were true, can we use that to help us understand how and why they lived in constant fear?  Can we move the ball forward by admitting that even if it's hard to believe this one story, that surely, somewhere in Mississippi there are true stories like this that never made it out of the grave?

I am caught between whites and blacks in the town of my ancestors.  Both hold me up as a spokesperson for their side.  I am not a referee who will determine whose story is true.  I'm more interested in why people believe in and want to tell their stories at all.  I am a collector of memories.

Adichie says that "Stories matter. Many stories matter.  Stories have been used to dispossess and to malign, but stories can also be used to empower and to humanize.  Stories can break the dignity of a people, but stories can also repair that broken dignity."

My only hope is that people will keep talking, keep remembering, keep listening, and that they will keep moving the ball forward.  

Photographs

In the last year or so I’ve collected all the photos of Booker Wright that I could get my hands on.  I made numerous calls, visited people, and had relatives send pictures from their homes around the country.  All of that work produced a total of six photos of my late grandfather. 

Today I saw eight more.  They were all taken at the same time.  In them, my grandfather is lying on a table without a shirt on.  His stomach has eight lines in it that look like wounds that have been stapled shut.  Each one is about three inches wide and there is about an inch separating them.  They are all in a row from his chest down past his navel.  It’s hard to describe these stapled wounds because there is something in front of them, blocking my view.  It looks like an organ or maybe two. 

Someone who saw these photos briefly a few months ago said that it was intestines.  Seeing them for myself today, I know it’s not his intestines.  Someone else thought it may be his liver.  I can’t look at the photos long enough to make a guess.  I’ll show them to a doctor when I get back home. 

His side is riddled with pellets from the shotgun blast.  His eyes are closed.  I can’t tell whether or not he is dead or alive.

There is a tube and bottles of things around him.  It looks like he is in a closet or a makeshift morgue, but the Chief of Police insists that’s what hospital rooms looked like in the sixties here in Greenwood.  I need to take these photos to an expert.  

I broke down when I saw these photos.  Part of my mind is screaming.  Part of my mind is numb.  I needed to see these to get to the bottom of things, I think.  I don’t know.  Does uncovering every stone get me further to the truth or just more exposed to the horrific reality of loss?  I have tears and I don’t know why.  I can’t pinpoint the feeling.  It has no name. 

My mother can never see these photos. 

Home Away from Home

I'm in Greenwood and I just got back to my hotel room after the Mississippi premiere of Booker's Place: A Mississippi Story at Mississippi Valley State University.  That's a lot of Mississippi's.  

This afternoon I walked from my hotel through the neighborhoods surrounding Howard Street.  My Greenwood was quiet today.  Eventually, I walked over to the Delta Bistro and ordered a Fried Green Tomato Sandwich.  All I could say after eating it was, "Where have you been all my life?"

I'm going out to dinner tomorrow at the Delta Bistro and may order the exact same thing!

We're Going

I just got a call from the East Mississippi Correctional Facility.  Lloyd "Blackie" Cork has added my name to his visitor list.

This post is called "We're Going" because I was too afraid to go alone.  I have a good friend, Sherry Rankins-Robertson, who has actually spent a lot of time in prisons working with inmates on creative writing.  Sometime in October she and I will go to this prison for the mentally ill and we will sit across a table from the man who murdered my grandfather.

The visiting room is one in which physical touch is allowed.  I'll be able to shake his hand, if I want to.

A Prison for the Insane

Freaking out just a little bit, okay A LOT!  I was talking to a friend of mine and he mentioned that Cork is in a hospital for the mentally ill.  I checked on wikipedia and it turns out that the East Mississippi Corrections Facility, where Cork is housed, is the place where all of the prisoners in their system are sent when they have a mental illness.

I called the woman who runs Cork's floor and I said, "So, is your facility a prison for the criminally insane?"

She said, "Basically.  Especially on this floor, we have the worst cases here.  Many of them are patients," I guess she meant as opposed to prisoners.  She may be referring to people who are legally labeled as criminally insane.  Her floor, Cork's floor, is the worst one.  He lives on the floor that houses the most severe, most dangerous prisoners.

I am physically ill.  I want to face him and I will not back down, but I am really nervous.  Flashbacks of the movie Shutter Island keep racing through my mind.

I figured that he'd be a little off, simply because he's been incarcerated for so long. I was trying to prepare for that.  But this, this new revelation, I don't know how to prepare for it.  Is he schizophrenic?  Does he have multiple personalities?  Is he violent?

I find myself wondering whether or not he can tell me anything useful.  What if he just sits there in a puddle of his own drool?  Is the Cork of 1973 who killed my grandfather even inside of the Cork of 2012?  I picture myself sitting across from him, using words, body language, and facial expressions to try to delve deeper into his mind, to try to get to the truth.  Will he be able to help me or will I just get lost in there?

Sometimes I wonder whether or not he has Internet access and, if so, if he has read this blog.  Does he know what I wrote about him here?  Does he know that I'm afraid?

Meeting a Murderer

I wrote this a few weeks ago:

Sometimes writing it like being lost.  Not turned around or momentarily confused.  It is like being seriously, frighteningly lost, uncertain of which is way is up, how to get out, how far or how deep or wide the thing is that I’m inside of.  Sentences don’t do this to me, although, a paragraph has been known to leave me stumped.  A chapter can definitely make me feel lost.  Sometimes, however, I am lost in an entire book.  What once seemed like the perfect layout now feels sophomoric.  The story itself can start to feel thin and pointless.

When I’m lost I’m usually also exhausted, physically and mentally.  I can’t remember why I started and I just want to stop.  For lots of reasons, I can’t.  

At some point, I’ll usually remember the last time that I was lost, and the time before that, and the time before that.  With relief, I’ll recall that each time I was lost before I didn’t find my way out, the way out found me.  Sometimes a person will make a comment in passing about the weather or life in general and I’ll realize that their statement is the answer to my writing challenge.  Sometimes someone will read my work and make a simple statement that changes everything.  Other times, I just wake up one morning and know what needs to be done.

Today, I am lost and tired.  1% of my brain knows that it won’t last.  Change is on the horizon and I will find a way out.  99% of my brain is convinced that there is no way out.  Like being locked in a coffin I am anxious, sweating, desperate, and unable to remain calm.  I want to move, act, talk, eat, change my clothes, anything, I just have to keep going because the weight of being lost is heaviest when I am still and silent. 

I am fried and late and lost. 

I wrote the above piece because the ending of my book was lame.  In the first half of my book I learn about my grandfather and all about Greenwood, and then the second half  of the book is about me trying to uncover the story of his murder.  Then the book switches gears and sort of ends.  In the final chapter I write my theory about the murder and talk about how I’ll continue to research it.  Blah, blah, blah.  

Last year I was supposed to go visit Cork, the man who murdered my grandfather (I think).  I chickened out.  Read this and this.  Recently though, out of the fog of confusion I've felt about the ending to my book I realized something.

My book is unfinished because the story is unfinished.

In an excel file I have a list of chapters and the other day I added a new one called “Meeting a Murderer,” then I put a certified letter in the mail to Cork, asking him if I can meet with him.

Part of me doesn’t want to meet him because Cork may say or do something that marks the end of the road.  It's like I've been racing down a freeway that doesn't have a speed limit and meeting Cork is a brick wall falling into my path.  My work to understand my grandfather’s life and the murky circumstances surrounding his death may stop on a dime with the words of a man who could be insane.  Was he hired?  Did he do it for no reason or the oldest reason?  All of my questions might get answered when I sit across from a murderer.

But pushing that meeting off into infinity is not fair to the readers who will follow my quest.  It’s also not fair to Booker Wright.

In October I'm traveling to Mississippi and, if Cork agrees to it, I am meeting with a murderer.  Typing that feels profound.  I’m setting my plans in stone and this time, I will not turn back.  

Untethered

During the past year I've spent a lot of time thinking about family.  One of the early ideas that was floated around about the documentary, "Booker's Place: A Misssissippi Story", was focusing the doc on the reason I was searching for Booker Wright in the first place, the answers to which were buried deep in a host of family memories.

In an early draft of my book I wrote:
Family is the cord that keeps us tethered to the earth.  Its memories, habits and secrets are woven together to form a thick rope that both anchors us and makes us relevant.  Everything we do eventually floats away on aimless currents, but maybe there is something in us, impossible to name or pinpoint that renders us inexplicably unforgettable to family. 

"Family is the cord that keeps us tethered to the earth."  Looking back I realize that, growing up while feeling so disconnected from family left me with the belief that, if I could construct a sense of family or if I could I find a place to belong, "where everybody knows your name," that I would somehow be complete.

Many of my life choices were governed by a quest to find family.  My choice of friends, where to worship, who to marry, what groups to join were all determined by the level of family I hoped to build with strangers.  I didn't allow these relationships or choices to happen organically.  I was always thinking of the long term, always looking down the line 10 or 20 years into the relationship.  I was planning, calculating, even scheming to win hearts and find a place so that I wouldn't have to float, untethered.

At 37, I am finally realizing that this doesn't work.  Yes, I need to make choices for myself, but not based on a fear that I will one day be alone.  I have to spend a little time in my life, truly being untethered, to prove to myself that I can.  It's like I'm running from loneliness, but I always end up lonely because I chose my crowd for the wrong reasons.  I heard someone say once that, in life, it's just me, God, and the dirt.  I'm trying on that life for awhile.

Stained.

I'm sitting at my laptop studying photos of Booker's Place.  They were taken by the Greenwood Police Department the morning after my grandfather was shot.  My eye kept going back to something on the floor.  It looks as though he had concrete flooring, but part of it looked strange.

I realized that it was wet.  There's a long, wide path of moisture as if someone had tossed buckets of water on the floor.  In the middle of the water stain is a thin, red circle. It looks like an outline from a blood puddle that someone tried to wash clean.

I feel like I might throw up.

No More Homeschooling

I'm not homeschooling anymore.  Just typing that was like lifting the world off of my shoulders and watching it crash into the ground.  An Atlas shrug.  I can list a thousand reasons why I stopped, but then it would be like I was trying to justify my decision to you.  Suffice it say, it was a decision long in the making.  It was painful.

Homeschooling was more than a school choice, it was a way of life.  It was the sound of feet pounding through my house all day.  It was spontaneous hugs, kisses, and cuddles.  Now, it's gone.  Of course, my kids aren't gone. I still get to have them with me in the afternoons.  I enjoy them even more because now, I get to miss them.

Maybe they'll go to school for one year or ten.  I don't know.  What I do know is that I feel better.  Slower, refreshed, and less like the entire future of my children's lives is resting on how I spend every moment of every day.  It turns out that I'm not the mom I thought I was.  I strove to be her, but she was always just beyond my grasp. I really am this other mom.  A mom who wants a career.  A mom who can say good-bye to her kids every morning.

I have to be honest and authentic or I will be crazy.  So, here I am, doing what I love to do, doing what I have dreamed of doing - I am writing, and the only sound in the house is the whirring water that's racing in circles inside of my dishwasher.  I miss my children, but not enough to bring them back home, yet.  Which mom am I, again?  Oh, yeah, I'm the happy one.

Literacy

My son was recently diagnosed with dyslexia.  This came after I'd spent years homeschooling him and trying every reading method that I could get my hands on. At first I thought the problem was him, that he wasn't trying hard enough because he preferred to play with his toys than to do school with mommy.  Then, I thought it was me, and that I was just not a good enough teacher.  Finally, I became convinced that I just needed to find the right curriculum.

One day last year, we were doing school and it was like I was seeing him for the first time.  Something was wrong and it wasn't me, it wasn't him, and it wasn't the curriculum.  He could read on grade level, and he had excellent comprehension, but it was devastatingly difficult for him.  To read an entire paragraph he had to hit himself, pinch himself, and would usually cry out, but only after first exhibiting reluctance and anger.

In my house, dyslexia looks like a bad little boy.  It looks like ADD.  It does not look like a bonafide disorder.  When it was first recommended to me that I take him in to get tested for dyslexia, I was taken aback to discover that neither my insurance, or our local school district, recognized it as its own individual disorder.  We would have to pay out of pocket to save our son from illiteracy.

Thankfully, we can.  We're not rich, but we have investments and excellent credit. We could lose our house paying for his treatments, but we can still pay.  For some families, the cost may as well be in the millions as opposed to the thousands. Some families would never, ever be able to come up with the hourly rate required to get their children the help that they need.

I tend to feel sorry for myself.  When bad things happen, I often look to the sky and wonder what I've done to deserve the most recent calamity that's come into my life. The older I get, the more that I realize it's not all about me.  Nevertheless, when my son received his diagnosis I fell into a sad and fear-filled silence.  For days I wanted to ask why this had happened to my boy.  Why was such a sweet, smart child afflicted with a disorder that makes most people believe that they're dumb.

As I was having these thoughts, I was also thinking about the best way to build the board for Booker's Place, the new non-profit that I'm planning to launch this year, with the help of Lynn Roer from Ogilvy and Mather.

There are two grown men in my family who cannot read.  Booker was also illiterate, that makes three (one of them is a blood relative of Booker's).  There are some who believe that dyslexia is genetic.  I have to wonder if it runs in my family? I read here that African-American dyslexics are more likely to be misdiagnosed as being mildly mentally disabled than their white counterparts.

Are dyslexics whose skin is a little darker and whose families have little money, less likely to get a proper diagnosis?  The doctor who diagnosed my son charged $190 an hour.  They said there was a chance insurance may not cover it.  The testing lasted four hours.  How many families can afford that?

The timing of all of this - getting the diagnosis while starting Booker's Place, has made me wonder if I can incorporate dyslexia treatment into the free services we provide.  School supplies are great and necessary, we will still do that.  Learning to read, in this society however, is like learning to breathe.  It's all but impossible to thrive without it.

I am finding myself having another wildest dream.  What if I could hire a dyslexia specialist or a reading specialist to work in a city and travel between Booker's Place locations, providing specialized reading programs to underprivileged kids?  Maybe they could even make house calls.  It would be really expensive, but it would change the world, one struggling reader at a time.  It may also be what Booker Wright would do.

Booker's Place: The Movement

I'm learning that in life, it's important to dream big dreams.  Five years ago, I said that I wanted the world to know about Booker Wright.  This past July, Dateline NBC aired an hour long special about him.  There's talk about partnering with an educational company to make our movie, Booker's Place: A Mississippi Story, available for schools to purchase.  That means that kids around the country might be taught the story of Booker Wright while they're learning about Medgar Evers and Rosa Parks.  My wildest dream is coming true.  So, why stop there.  I'm having another, incredibly wild dream.

Blogging about it now feels incredibly nuts, because this dream is in its infancy. The edges of it are fuzzy and none of the details have been worked out.  But, like I've said more times than I can count, this blog space is nothing more than a record of my Booker Wright journey.  So, here's my new dream:

A couple of weeks ago, a woman who is now my HERO, called with an amazing idea.  Her name is Lynn Roer and she is the Director of Moving Images, Alternative Content and Events at Ogilvy and Mather (whew, that's a mouthful) - Ogilvy and Mather partnered with Raymond De Felitta to help produce our film.  Lynn had this great idea about turning Booker's Place into a place for school children who may need school supplies, a bite to eat, or even free tutoring.

This is the perfect way to honor my grandfather's legacy for one reason - he was all about education.  Booker Wright didn't get to go school because he had to work to support his family.  He entered adulthood without literacy.  Not being able to read never sat well with him.  I've heard that, a few years before he was murdered, Booker hired a tutor and he finally achieved his lifelong dream of learning to read.

I've met scores of adults who knew Booker when they were kids and they all describe a man who was a broken record when it came to talking about the importance of getting an education.  He even held back money from the paychecks of some of his employees, only to hand them a wad of cash when it was time for them to go out and buy school supplies.  He bought a bus to drive kids from outlying farming towns into Greenwood so that they could attend Head Start and on and on.  You see why I love him, so.  He was a great man, even when no one was watching.

The original idea was to re-open Booker's Place in Greenwood, Mississippi.  The wild idea is to have a Booker's Place in every state and, one day, in every major city.  Booker's Place could be a corner or a bookshelf in a library with free school supplies.  It could be a place to call and make an appointment for free tutoring.

The point is that lots of kids slip through the cracks because they can't even come up with the basics.  My kids recently went to public school for the first time and I was amazed at all the stuff I had to buy for them - it was not cheap and I know that a lot of families simply can't carry the financial burden.

So, come on, let's start a movement.  Please don't think that all you can do is provide money.  Talk about this.  Facebook about it.  Get the people you know energized.  We'll need supplies, volunteers, ideas, and influence, but more than anything, we'll need you to care and to stay engaged.

Click here to sign up for my newsletter.  I'll be sending out updates on Booker's Place each month to let you know how we're doing and to ask your help in getting the word out.

Shouldn't every kid get a fair shot at an education?  Join with me, to do all that we can to make that happen.

My Boy

I come from a broken family.  Usually when people use the phrase "broken family" they are referring to a family where the parents are divorced.  My parents separated when I was 15 however, when I say that I come from a broken family I mean that I come from broken people.

It's always hard for me, incredibly hard, to write about the failings of my parents. Like I talked about in this post, now that I am a mother myself I have to constantly reconcile the mother I dreamed I'd be with the mother I really am.  It's humbling. Parenting is humbling.

My parents' problems always seemed obvious to me.  There were three kids in my family and none of us was planned.  My parents kind of raised us that way - unplanned, shooting from the hip.  They abused substances, forgot about us, and got lost in their own problems.  I've spent countless hours on the couches of psychologists trying to work through the quagmire of who I am because of the pain that my parents gifted me with.  At least, that's what I used to believe.  The simple truth is that I blamed them for what I didn't like about myself.

One of the ideas I've explored a lot here in this blog space, is the idea that the members of my family wear a "mark" because we're from Greenwood.  There is a heritage of slavery that haunts us.  Greenwood was slave country, and we are her descendants.

Years ago, before that idea had occurred to me, I thought I had all the answers.  In my arrogance, I believed that I could construct the perfect family in the same way that I could mix together and bake the perfect cake.  I met a man who didn't drink, had a stable job, and seemed to be the perfect puzzle piece to build my ideal family on.  He was the cornerstone, and we were both the builders.  We had two sons.  I read to them, I home schooled them, took them to the park, and was convinced that my love would be all that they'd need to be perfectly, adorably happy.  I was wrong.

I always thought that I was sad as a girl because I had absent, selfish parents. Then, I met my son.  He is sad.  He cries a lot and talks often about how much he hates himself.  He is seven years-old.  I play with him, read books to him, take him to all types of doctors, and sometimes, in the quiet of the night, I resent it all.  He reminds me so much of myself at that age.  I was 11 the first time I contemplated committing suicide.  I always thought that particular detail was a reflection of the terrible, oh, so awful home life I came from.

In the life I have today, I easily spend 20 hours a week trying to save my son.  I take him to specialists, read books on kids that are "different", and talk to other moms. Every day it feels like the two of us are on a course marked for certain destruction. It's a game.  People are hiding where I cannot see them.  They watch us and laugh at us as we try to get off, because there is no "off."  There is only a mother trying desperately to find the right pill, the right program, the right diagnosis, the right anything.

Sometimes, he smiles at me.  He truly is the most beautiful boy in the world (although he may be tied with his brother).  He has caramel-colored skin that he hates because it's not white.  He is tall and most people think he's three years older than he actually is.  I know that one day when he's a man he will love being tall. For now, though, it's like a cross to bear.  People look at him and wonder why he can't do more.  Why is he crying?  Why is he screaming?

As I deal with him, trying to nurture and love without getting tapped out, his father lingers in the background, already talking about military school.   I picked him because I thought he'd be the perfect father.  But, I also thought that I would be the perfect mother.

Some days, I am painfully aware of the fact that I'm the only one who "gets" my son. Others hear rage, I hear a panic attack coming on.  I perceive the tears behind the behavior. Sometimes, I wish I could permanently tie him to me to help him navigate every situation or at a minimum, I want to construct a world in which he would experience no pain, a world in which everyone would "get" him.

Along with all of this, I have to wonder two things: 1) Is he like this because I am like my parents? Or 2) were my parents normal and all of my crap was my own fault because I was messed up biochemically or something?

Either answer kind of sucks.  If answer 1 is the truth, then does that make me a terrible mother?  If 2 is true, then I've spent all of these years blaming innocents for my own loneliness.

I've made some of the most critical choices in my life because I wanted to build the perfect family.  I don't have the perfect family.  I have a broken family and I don't know what to do about it.  

Branded

When I was a girl, I dreamed of being a writer.  In middle school, I started reading Sweet Valley High books and other teen romance novels.  In my early teens, I read E.L. Doctorow, Pat Conroy, John Irving, Hemingway, and F. Scott Fitzgerald.  In my late teens, I painfully made my way through Shakespeare and Faulkner, all the while imagining that one day I'd be sitting at a desk writing deep, complicated tales that would both reveal and inform the American way of life.

I didn't write those tales.  Actually, I didn't finish those tales  Every laptop and every computer I've ever owned contains dusty hard drives imprinted with half-written stories that are trapped in an eternal, peaceful sleep.  When it comes to fiction, I'm just not a finisher.  During those blurry days when I started and restarted my computerized masterpieces, I was using napkins, scratch paper, and the backs of grocery lists to jot down my feelings. Unbeknownst to me, where I was failing at fiction, I was succeeding at non-fiction.  

Around this time I discovered the story of Booker Wright, and I made a choice that would change my life.  I decided to record, here on this blog, the steps I took to uncover his story and my efforts to grasp his soul.  Some of my earlier posts are lame.  I'll be the first to say that.  You can see me struggling to find my way.  At first, I thought that no one would ever read my blog, so I wrote hurtful things about my family, revealing with reckless detail, all of their earthly failures.  

In the summer of 2011, I made a documentary about my grandfather, called Booker's Place: A Mississippi Story.  After our first shoot, the filmmakers went back to their work spaces and started trying to pull together a movie.  I went into a corner and started blogging about everything.  Every feeling, every emotion, every moment of bliss and pain, I recorded here.   

My computers tend to die sudden deaths, and I can't keep up with printed copies. I've lost every story I wrote as a young girl.  That's why I posted here.  I was afraid that if I collected my random thoughts anyplace else that, one day, they'd be gone, accidentally thrown away or trapped in a computer that'd been murdered by the latest virus.  So, I blogged.  Blogging helped me to process, and it simply made me feel better. 

At the time, the only "visitors" to my blog were poor souls from the Ukraine who'd typed in the wrong URL. Then, one day the producer called and said, "Everybody in NY loves you."  He meant everyone at his agency who was working on the film.  I said, "Why?"  He said, "They've read your blog."

I felt like someone had just said, "Hey, yesterday, when you were showering, the window was open and everybody on 46th St. and 11th Avenue was watching."  It was weird.  I went back and read some of my earlier posts, the ones where I talked about which members of my family couldn't hold down jobs and which ones would go on shopping sprees and then not have enough money to pay their bills.  I did some quick deleting.  

Since then, I've tried really, really, really hard to keep writing with the same mission I had at first.  I write to escape, to work out my feelings, to make sense of what stalks my soul, and to record, so that in 30 years I can go back and accurately remember.  

But something has been lost.  Sometimes, I feel like I'm changing my clothes with eyes on me.  I wear my best undergarments, turn my body in a way to highlight my toned parts, but hide the flabby ones.  I have about 60 blog drafts here that I chose not to post because I didn't want to throw anyone under the bus or make anyone angry.  In some ways, I'm a brand now.  When I start to write I catch myself wondering if the writing will enhance or hurt my brand.  I wonder if it will make the people who've invested in me happy or angry.  Will it help the movie?  Will it hurt my book?

My soul lives here.  I stamp myself onto this blog space.  Just now, I started to type, "I stamp myself onto this blog space, because..."  but nothing came after "because."  I don't know why I leave myself here, I just do.  

There are things about this project that I need to work out.  I've seen my counselor about them, talked to girlfriends about them, and even started several pen to paper writings about them.  But for some reason, at least for now, I only seem to be able to get to "the end" of my conflicted emotional ropes when I am here, sitting in a coffee shop, shutting out the conversations around me, and staring at this empty white space, the one that invites me to pour it all out - the goopey, confusing stuff that sloshes around inside me.  

I've learned a lot about myself through this process, most of it hasn't been too beautiful.  I'm working on a book about this journey and I've had to dive deep into my past.  Some shameful truths have come to the surface and I want to run from them.  Lately, I've been spending a lot of time in my bed staring at the ceiling, tossing and turning, and trying to shut out who I am.  It's not working, so I'm switching gears.

I'm really hopeful that if I can write through some of this, that I can get to the other side of the murkiness and once again feel the sun shining on my face.  Some people will think I'm using this platform to harm.  What I've learned about those people is that nothing I say makes any difference, they'll assume the worst about me, anyway.  Blogs are free, go get your own.  

I'm starting a "hard truths" series.  Hopefully, I can use this space to face myself.

Behind the Talk

I've gone back and forth about whether or not to delete some of the uglier comments that were left on my post about Lusco's Restaurant.  The simple truth is that talking about race is anything but simple.  It's complicated, messy, humiliating, dangerous, and sometimes it doesn't seem worth it.  But it is.  If we can keep our wits about us, we can move forward, one conversation at a time.

I'm no expert, but I sincerely think that one of the critical aspects of successfully talking about race is actually the stuff behind the talk.  This is one of the things I learned from my grandfather.  Booker was well regarded in both the black and white communities.  Blacks saw him as a successful business owner who ran a restaurant that celebrities frequented when they were in the Delta, he owned several rental houses, and had what appeared to be friendship with influential whites.  Dentists, doctors, and lawyers shared laughs with him.  On the white side of Greenwood he was the most dearly loved waiter in the town's most popular restaurant for the upper class.

He had it made, and he threw it all away in a moment to do what we all need to do when we talk about race.  He showed us his humanity.

He did not say mean things.  He did not make fun of anyone.  Instead, he shed his image of success, layer by layer removing his guise of strength and joviality, and told the nation that he lay awake in bed each night worrying about the future.  He told us that the way he was sometimes treated at work made him want to cry.

Our country is in a mess.  It seems almost impossible to talk about race without lowering ourselves to schoolyard communication techniques.  I think sometimes we forget that we're talking to actual people and we begin to feel as though we're talking to the issue itself, as if it has taken on the flesh of the one we're arguing with.

There are some basic truths that we may want to hold on to when we engage in these complicated conversations.  We all have the capacity to love, to hurt, and to ache.  We all love our children and would do whatever we think needs to be done to protect them.  (Yes, I know there are some crazies out there who do not love their children, but we're not talking about them).  We want to protect our homes from the unknown.  We want safety and a hope for a bright future.

Let's start there.  Let's start with what makes us the same, because what makes us different is often times found in the slight nuances of how we respond to these same intrinsic yearnings and desires.  At the core of who I am, beneath my shade of skin, underneath my life choices, there is a warm core that is probably similar to the core of a racist.

One of the most difficult things I've had to do in the last 18 months is sit down with people who knew my grandfather but failed to see his humanity.  I was tempted to do the same to them.  I wanted to humiliate them, cut them down, and expose their lack of understanding.  But that is not the response of the rational and it denies the beautiful gift that my grandfather gave to me and to all of us.

Instead of inciting more hate, I push forward, determined to find a common ground of shared human experiences with everyone, even those who might cringe if they saw my son in an alley with a hoodie atop his head.  I make a conscious choice to be a peacemaker, because it's what Booker Wright would do.

Masters and Man

Check out this video on Dateline.  It's a clip that didn't appear in Dateline's Finding Booker's Place broadcast.  In it, Raymond De Felitta talks about about the place where we stayed while making Booker's Place: A Mississippi Story and, what it was like to visit the South.

The Tallahatchie Flats, where we stayed during filming, is an interesting place.  It's a collection of reclaimed sharecropper shacks that sits on the Tallahatchie River, the same river where Emmitt Till's body was discarded after he'd been beaten and tortured all night long for making a sound in the direction of a white woman.

The Flats have been restored enough to make them livable.  They have working toilets, the spaces between the floorboards have been sealed, and each flat has at least one room with a window air conditioning unit.  It's strange to me that people think its quaint to live in sharecropper shacks.  It reminds me of people who tour Alcatraz and want to be temporarily locked up.

Raymond makes a point in this video that I really want the world to know: sharecropping continued well into the 1970s.  Many blacks continued to live at or below the poverty level while they worked their fingers to the bone in hot fields only to be told at the end of the year that they hadn't earned enough money to get paid. Many young black boys, my father included, were expected to miss school when the harvest came in.

I have to say though, the Flats truly are in God's country.  They overlook breathtakingly beautiful fields that stretch on and on.  Nights at the Flats are blanketed by an eerie silence.  I have to wonder how many slaves were whipped in those fields, and how many mothers had their young sons dragged from their arms because someone decided it was time for their sons to be sold.

Many times in the last five years I've thought about tracing my roots back as far as I can.  I envision myself uncovering the stories of my ancestors who lived as slaves. I went back two generations and found Booker Wright.  His presence in my family line has been an amazing gift, but it hasn't come without a cost.  His story pains me, and I wonder how I will bear the weight of all the other stories which will most likely grow more and more painful as I look back deeper and deeper in time.  Maybe I'll save this job for my sons.  Maybe I'll be brave enough to do it tomorrow, or next year, or in the next decade.

Lusco's Restaurant

Wow, the pot has been stirred.  Apparently, since Dateline aired Finding Booker's Place this past Sunday, Lusco's Restaurant has received threats via phone and email.  People have threatened to burn down their restaurant and the owners of Lusco's have been harassed at gas stations and at other public places.  Lusco's is the restaurant where Booker was working when he experienced the racially charged treatment that hurt him so deeply.  That was in 1965.

I am deeply saddened to hear the news that today, in 2012, the family that owns Lusco's is being harassed.  The heart of Booker Wright's message was to let people know what it feels like to be on the receiving end of racism.  His message was not meant to incite hate or violence.  Anyone who responds to my grandfather's story with more hate has clearly missed the point.  I have personally eaten at Lusco's Restaurant many, many times.  They have the best steaks in the Delta and they have always welcomed me with open arms.

I want everyone to know that when we were looking into my grandfather's life, the filmmakers and I were eager to find photos and footage of him.  The folks at Lusco's had a box full of old and precious 8 mm film that spanned decades.  They suspected that some of that film might contain a few minutes of footage of Booker Wright.  They trusted us enough to send several boxes of film to New York, where we processed it and found, out of hours and hours of footage, a few precious Booker Wright moments.  Having that additional footage, seeing my grandfather as a young man, was a gift beyond words.  That was a gift from Lusco's.

The family that owns Lusco's has supported my research with openness and kindness.

As a nation and as a people, we should revisit the hurts of the past to learn from them, not to imitate them.  Anyone who has harassed the family that owns Lusco's Restaurant today, should be ashamed.

I am Booker Wright's granddaughter and I embrace Lusco's Restaurant and so should you.

Who Killed Booker Wright

There's been lots of talk about whether or not Booker was murdered because of his appearance in Frank's film, Mississippi: A Self-Portrait. This is one of the ideas that's explored in Booker's Place: A Mississippi Story.  To be clear, seven years passed between Booker's 1966 news appearance and his murder in 1973.  That's a long time for someone to wait for revenge.

Nevertheless, there are a whole host of strange details about the murder, and some Greenwood residents still believe today that Lloyd "Blackie" Cork was hired to kill my grandfather.  Who hired him?  I don't know.  One lifelong Greenwood resident told me that a white cop hired Blackie to commit the murder.  Interestingly, people who witnessed the murder are really uncomfortable talking about it.  Even though Booker's Place had lots of customers that night and McLaurin Street was hopping with activity, only one person testified to actually seeing Blackie fire a gun.  She's alive and she's avoiding me.  The cop who pistol-whipped Booker Wright still lives just a short 45 minute drive from Greenwood.

If I could drop this, I would.  I don't want to create a story where there isn't one, but I also don't want to be naive and believe a tale that's full of holes.  I have an indescribable, difficult to explain passion for my grandfather.  My love for him is fierce.  I am tormented by his murder, by the loss of a man who surely would've embraced me had he been given the chance.  I'm trying to think of the word to describe my feelings.  It's more than duty, it's more than feeling tasked, it's more than being compelled.  I know that I may never get to the bottom of his murder.  Or maybe I already have.  Maybe the odd, yet simple story is the truth.  What I know for certain, is that I won't have peace until I've done all that I can get to the truth.

I'm hoping to sit down with Cork where he lives in a Mississippi State prison in late September to ask finally, face-to-face, exactly what happened that night.  I hope to God that he tells me the truth.

Dateline

I am overwhelmed with joy by the responses I've received so far from people who watched Dateline over the weekend.  I've been fielding phone calls and emails, but later today I'll make some time to post about my thoughts on the piece.

More than anything, I am delighted that my grandfather's story is getting out to the masses.  GO BOOKER WRIGHT!!!!

Are We Losing Our Humanity?

This is a question that a good friend of mine is probing through a series of community activities sponsored by ASU.  This idea, that as a people we can lose sight of what really makes us human makes me think of Booker Wright.

He was surrounded by people who enjoyed him.  He was fun-loving, humorous, kind, thoughtful, and humiliated almost every day.  The very people who believed they had friendship with him failed to actually take in his humanity.  They were living in a societal structure that let them believe that he was probably content with his station in life.  Why would an illiterate black man in the mid-1960s want anything more than to wait on tables and deliver a steak and a song night after night?

What I've learned, from sharing meals and memories with these very people, is that they did truly love him.  That cannot be denied.  Yes, they failed to see him, but they didn't know it at the time.  This has been one of the biggest lessons for me in all of this.  I don't want to be so busy in my daily life that I fail to see those in need or in heartache around me.  There will always be politics, but each individual that I come across in my daily life is unique and temporary.  I have to choose to celebrate people even if we're not on the same side of the aisle.  Booker Wright taught me that.

Wanting the World to Know

Five years ago when I first learned about my grandfather's heroic statements to the national news crew I felt like something was happening that was bigger than me.  I felt as though I was being handed a precious gift and also, that I was being tasked with the responsibility of sharing that gift with the world.

So much has transpired during those years.  I type these words with tears of joy and a heart that is filled to the brim with excitement.  People are hearing his story.  Once again, Booker Wright's name and his words are making their way across the nation.  His tender, yet triumphant story of humiliation mixed with hope is a beautiful song that, if we listen, can inform and influence the way in which we interact with one another and lead our daily lives.

With tears of joy and hands held high I proclaim "GO BOOKER WRIGHT!"

I've recorded lots of thoughts and memories throughout the course of the journey.  I've put them together in a collection called Searching for Booker Wright, which can be picked up on Amazon for just $2.99.  Like me on Facebook and get a free, 36 page preview of this book.    

You can now purchase Searching for Booker Wright: A Collection of Blog Posts and Journal Entries on Amazon for $2.99.  It features selected posts from this blog along with numerous previously unpublished journal entries.  Follow along with me as I face the challenges that go along with digging up the past.  In addition, readers will also get a behind-the-scenes glimpse of how the documentary Booker's Place: A Mississippi Story came into being.

Dateline Promo

Here's the promo for the Dateline episode this Sunday:

http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/3032600/

Dateline NBC: Finding Booker's Place

It's official.  Dateline NBC will be a one hour special on Booker's Place: A Mississippi Story, Sunday July 15 called Finding Booker's Place.


I am beyond ecstatic that so many people are going to hear about his triumphant journey!

Go Booker Wright!!!

Same Story, Different Lens

The reviews are coming in.  Not the critics’ reviews, but the resident reviews.  I’ve gotten two lengthy emails from Greenwood residents about the film; neither of them was very good.

Both of the people who wrote to me felt as though Greenwood was not well represented.  It struck them that people would get the impression that Greenwood was stuck in the past.  I’m torn about how to respond to these individuals.

One of the initial thoughts Raymond had about the movie was to make a “Greenwood Now and Greenwood Then” film, one that would examine just how far Greenwood has come.  In the end, that’s not what happened.  The film we made dives deep into the story of Booker Wright, it examines questions surrounding his murder, and paints a picture of what Greenwood was like in the ‘60’s in order to create a proper context for what Booker Wright said and did.  I think we accomplished this.

One of the things I know for sure is that being the subject in a documentary is nerve wracking.  There is a complete loss of control.  Many times during this process I have felt angst, even anger over the direction I thought the film might go in.  Some of the people we interviewed, people who were kind enough to let us into their homes, spend an afternoon with us, get back to us quickly when we had urgent research questions now feel as though they participated in something that disparaged their community.  They feel powerless, I know the feeling.

There are two lanes of thought going through my mind, running simultaneously side-by-side.  The first is that Greenwood has changed.  They’ve had a black mayor.  Today the majority of the police force there is made of blacks.  It’s a radically different place than it was when Booker Wright walked her streets.  Longtime Greenwood residents love their town like people love their favorite football teams.  They spoke with us because they hoped to see a different story of the South told.  They wanted to see a film that would highlight how far they’ve come.  I get that. 

The second lane of thought and, I hate to say this, but Greenwood still feels very broken to me.  People who’ve lived there their whole lives see the change, but they don’t always see how far they still have to go.  I think that’s why our film angers them so.  One person said to me that he didn’t think there was still a market for speaking poorly about the South or telling the story of lynchings, etc. 

I know that Raymond did not construct this film based on what he thought would sell.  There is no money to be made in documentary filmmaking.  If he was trying to make a buck, this wasn’t how he was going to do it.  When I went to Greenwood last year and I think Raymond and David had the same experience, I was taken aback by certain things that I observed.

Maybe for Southerners the story feels old.  Maybe it’s hard for them to believe that everyone hasn’t heard it time and time again, but the truth is just that – many people still don’t understand the deep humiliation that blacks experienced day in and day out in the South. 

A few months ago I was talking to a good friend who’s from Arkansas.  I was explaining to her that I wanted to include certain details in my book to help people better understand what it meant to be black in the South.  When I told her which details I was thinking of she expressed that most people knew those things and that she personally wouldn’t want to read a chapter like that.

I pondered this for a long time.  Maybe this story and others like it have been told so often in the South that some white Southerners feel like they have done their penance and more.  They have apologized, instituted holidays, hold meetings like the Bridge – they have committed themselves to change.  But just because a story is old doesn’t mean that it’s no longer relevant. 

Not everyone knows, but everyone needs to know.

To the kind and thoughtful men and women who helped make this film, lending their voices and their memories, I am endlessly thankful.  I am deeply saddened that this story, or the way in which we chose to tell it, was so off-putting to them.  I understand why it was.  But I must stand behind the telling of this story.  Because so many people simply do not know.  

Cuddles on the Side

I haven't been posting lately because I made the decision that I have GOT to finish this book.  I've spent the last five months planning and working on structure and waiting for feedback.  I was beginning to feel like the heartbeat of the story was slipping away from me.

So, everyday I try to write at least five (but some days I get in 10) new pages and I send them to an amazing friend who sends back line item edits and she lets me know when certain sections make absolutely no sense.  On any given day I may have 10 new pages to write, 10 pages to edit from the first round of notes, and more pages to edit from the second round of notes.

This friend is moving across the country in a few weeks and I know that she's working through the night to help me.  There are no words for my gratitude.

Thankfully, some solid readers are coming out of the woodwork - people who embrace this work, get it, and like the friend mentioned above are willing to find space in their own busy lives to read my stuff and get me some feedback.  I don't know how people write entire books on their own.  It's like getting lost in a maze, sometimes, I just need a fresh set of eyes to help me see what is obviously not working and what is amazingly possible

I can say with certainty that there will be a solid draft of this book by the end of summer.  I'm trying to maintain my sanity by keeping up with my fitness so that the joy of reaching my goal isn't overshadowed by feeling like I have to get back in shape again. But when I'm tired and I know that I'll be at Starbucks before the early rising Arizona sun comes up, all that I want is a mug of rich, hot chocolate with added half-and-half.  For now when I feel that way I'm grabbing my running shoes and squeezing in a few miles, but who knows before this is done I might be grabbing my sandals and heading to the Safeway by my house because they have the best chocolate glazed donuts in the world.  Seriously.  They are the absolute best.

Needless to say, I am exhausted and bone tired.  Today I was trying to confirm the content of an interview I'd transcribed months ago and every time I leaned in close to listen I was interrupted by something like this:

"Mom, look I found an inchworm.  It's feet are sticky.  Would you like to hold it."

"That's so neat, that the feet are sticky, but no, sweetheart, Mommy doesn't want to hold your inchworm."

It takes me a few seconds to find my place again and capture my rhythm and then:

"Mom, if you want to hold my inchworm let me know because he sure is wiggly."

"Thanks, babe.  If I decide to hold him I'll let you know."

This goes on until finally I am holding a yucky inchworm in my palm.  I try to hand it back to my smiling child who is delighted to be teaching his squirmy mommy how to hold bugs.  "You can hold it for longer if you want mom."

"Thanks, babe."

On Affirmative Action

In Greenwood, many blacks lived on plantations as sharecroppers.  They lived on the property for free in homes that often didn't have running water or indoor plumbing.  Most of these homes had crooked walls, tin roofs and wooden floors with planks spaced so far apart you could see the ground below.  The deal was that you picked cotton from the time the sun came up until it went down.  Your children, your pets, your everything accompanied you to the fields.

My paternal grandmother was a single mom for a number of years.  This put her in a tough spot because most plantation owners required a man to be in the house. They also often required all of the males, as young as five years old, to pick cotton. This meant that as recently as the 1950's, many black boys in the South were not allowed to go to school for part of the year because they had to work the fields.

In 1972, my father was playing football at Norfolk State University when his stepfather died.  His mother, who was still living in Greenwood at the time, was forced to leave her plantation because there was no longer a man in the house. 1972. 1972.  Most people think that the plantation society that defined the South during slave times was over the minute an emancipation was signed.

The story of my family is the story of a system that lingered long past the headlines.

Do I think that black kids today should get a leg up because their ancestors, (not hundreds of years ago, but yesterday) couldn't read stories to their own children because they missed school and were barely literate?  I don't know.  What I do know is that anyone who wants to shout from the rooftops about what blacks do and do not deserve had better make sure that they know a little history, not just headlines.

A Trayvon Martin World

When Raymond De Felitta and I were doing the Q&A's after screenings of "Booker's Place: A Mississippi Story" in New York, we were often asked about whether or not we think things have changed in Greenwood.

When Frank went down to Greenwood in 1965 he had to first consult with the FBI. He had trouble pulling together a crew who would be willing to go down there with him.  Greenwood wasn't the safest place for people who were perceived to be pro-integration.  When we took our crew down there in the summer of 2011, the townspeople and local officials couldn't have been more helpful.

I think it's easy, especially as a black woman with young black sons, to feel angry and frustrated about how much farther the world needs to go in terms of race relations.  The mere idea that someone would automatically feel threatened when they see a black boy in a hoodie walking down the street is sad and scary at the same time.

Nevertheless, I know that I must embrace and proclaim all the change that has taken place.  This week is the 20 year anniversary of the LA Riots sparked by the Rodney King verdict.  I will never forget watching that footage and feeling fear.  Fear that I or someone I loved would one day be in the wrong place at the wrong time and that the authorities, the ones sent to protect us, would harm us.

For years I feared the police.  After awhile that fear kind of ebbed away.  Then I moved to Arizona.  I have a friend, a black woman who has four kids and is married to a man who looks and dresses a lot like Tupac Shakir.  He works in the music industry and drives luxury cars.  More than once their family has been pulled over and forced to sit on the side of the road while cops search their car for drugs. Clearly, we still have a ways to go.

But, here's the ray of hope.  When Trayvon Martin was killed, it wasn't just Al Sharpton raising his voice and asking whether or not the crime could have had something to do with race.  Whites, Blacks, Mexicans and people from all walks of life thought the story sounded fishy.  As a nation, we were collectively bothered by the idea that the only thing suspicious about this young boy was his color and his hoodie.

To be clear, whether or not George Zimmerman failed to value Trayvon Martin's life because of the color of his skin is something that I don't have the answer to.  The investigation is ongoing and I will hold back my judgement until all that can be known is known.  However, I am delighted that the chorus of people claiming that something smelled foul was a multi-colored chorus.

Theatrical Release

It looks like Tribeca is bringing "Booker's Place: A Mississippi Story" to a few more cities.  So far it's in New York, New Orleans, Detroit, and Philadelphia. YEAH!  I'll try to keep you guys posted about the other cities where you might be able to see it in theaters.

Thank you to everyone for all of your support of this film!

It's Complicated

Greenwood, Mississippi is still largely segregated.  Blacks live on the south side of the river and whites live north of it.  More and more blacks are moving to the white side of town, while many of the whites are moving out of town altogether.  The public schools in Greenwood are about 98% black because most of the white kids go to private schools.

When I went to Greenwood this past summer I expected to feel tension between myself and the white residents I would meet there.  Part of my goal in going was to confront and maybe even deconstruct "the racist".

What happened when I went to Greenwood surprised me and left me feeling conflicted.  Time and time again the white people from Greenwood including those I met in passing, those I interviewed, and those who helped with research wanted nothing less than an opportunity to embrace me.  Some of them felt intense warmth towards me because they had so dearly loved Booker Wright.  Others seemed to be trying to grasp at yet one more opportunity to clean up the image of the archetypal white Southerner.

The time I spent with them has left me in a strange position.  I sometimes find myself defending the white Southerner, trying to free them from the guilt that seems to be passed from generation to generation like an unwanted family heirloom.

I grew up in California and like a lot of people who haven't spent significant amounts of time in the South, the idea that some towns may still be segregated seems like absolute nonsense to me.  I know that most major cities have "bad" parts of town where it's not uncommon for economically depressed people of color to live. That's not what's going on in Greenwood.  Regardless of economics, whites and blacks live mostly apart.

From an outsiders vantage point it appears that whites and blacks are in a simple and seemingly sophomoric stand off that just needs to be done away with.  The idea that a town could have a white side and a black side in 2012 is deplorable to me.

But what if it was you?  Would you take your kids with ivory white skin and clear blue eyes and move them to the black side of town where the roads are so torn up they look like they haven't been serviced in years?  Would you move your kids to a school district in which many of the high school students struggle to read at a second grade level?  Would you move your family to the side of town where most of your city's crimes are committed?

Maybe you would.  I don't know if I could do it.

Many people feel called to change the world in some small way.  They might feed the homeless, take in foster care children, champion causes like autism or childhood obesity.  Clearly many Southerners, white and black, have not chosen to make unifying the races a central theme of their lives.  Does that make them bad people?  Does that make them racists?

If a white person lives in the South does that automatically mean that they need to make solving the race conundrum their sole aim?  Maybe the answer is yes. Maybe being white and Southern automatically means that one is shackled with that responsibility like it or not.  Either they work and work for racial unity or they are held responsible for racial disunity.

I wrestle with wondering whether or not this is fair.  But I also think that if everyone turns a blind eye to the problems in their own communities then the world will never progress.  In the 1960's many whites in Greenwood lived as though they were oblivious to the civil rights movement happening around them.  Booker Wright's words brought the harsh reality of it home to them.  He made them so uncomfortable that they could no longer deny just how unhappy their blacks were.

Maybe that's why so many of the whites are moving out of Greenwood.  Maybe they don't know how to fix the problem, but they also don't want to be reminded of it any longer.

In the midst of this confusing and frustrating situation there is hope.  I met many white Mississippians who are trying to do all that they can to bring Greenwood back together one conversation at a time.

Questions and Answers

After each official Tribeca screening of the film, Raymond, David, and I do a Q&A. It has been truly amazing to hear the immediate reactions of audience members.  I was fearful that the Q&A's would feel flat and that we'd be standing up there waiting for people to ask questions.  The opposite has happened.  The Tribeca moderators usually have to cut the Q&A short because the discussion goes on and on. After each one Raymond, David and I move into the lobby where people surround us and ask questions and often debate different issues surrounding the complications of race.

Tonight at the Q&A someone asked us why the whites in Greenwood were so angry about what Booker said.  I responded by saying that many of them believed that they had true friendship with him.  It never occurred to them that he would've minded some of the sour treatment he had to endure.  Booker mocked them.  He changed his tone of voice and moved his body to actually mimic them.  I said, "Imagine if you thought you were friends with someone and then you saw them on television expressing that you really weren't friends at all and then seeing that person mimic the way you talk."  It would be upsetting.

But there's another side to this coin.  I explained to the audience that in the course of making this film I got to sit down with Karen Pinkston, the current owner of Lusco's.  When she explained how hurt the Lusco's customers were I was able to express to her that Booker probably thought that he couldn't tell his white "friends" how he really felt.  He probably thought that he couldn't say, "Please stop calling me n-----."

After the Q&A was over I was in the lobby surrounded by people who connected with the work and having interesting discussions with them when David tapped me on the shoulder.  He pointed to an elderly white couple and said, "These people used to live in Greenwood, used to eat at Lusco's, and knew your grandfather."

I was delighted and horrified at the same time.  Delighted because once again I was given the gift of meeting someone who'd actually known my grandfather. Horrified because I had just tried to express the collective thoughts of their community and their peers.  After exchanging pleasantries I said, "I do hope that as you watch the film and hear us talk about it that we're accurately and respectively representing what was true in Greenwood during that time in regards to the complicated relationships between whites and blacks."  Before I could even finish my statement they were nodding at me.  They didn't feel offended and they felt like we got it.

This was probably one of the highest compliments I've received so far.  I have talked so much about "our national dialogue on race" that I'm practically blue in the face (although as a black girl, I really might be more of a dark shade of purple).  I have felt concerned for years about how difficult it is for people to talk about race.  I don't want to be a polarizing person.  I try to have these painful and difficult conversations in a way that is underscored by kindness.

Today I was asked to explain the position of the people who my grandfather waited on for most of his life.  Many of these people embraced him without ever recognizing how humiliated he felt.  It would've been easy for me to vilify them, but then I'd be a hypocrite.  If I want people to listen to Booker's heartache, I have to be willing to respect that sometimes whites then and now simply don't know what's going on or what to do.  There's no evil in that.

Finding the balance when talking about race is hard.  At least this time, I think I got it right.

The Myth of the Angry Black Person

This past Sunday night I attended the premiere of “Booker’s Place: A Mississippi Story” at the Tribeca Film Festival in New York City.  As I sat there in the dark listening to people react to the film my heart swelled with pride for Booker Wright.  “You did it,” I thought to myself as I watched my grandfather on the screen.

As hard as I’ve worked on this for so many years it wasn’t until Sunday that I finally grasped the true magic of my grandfather’s words.  If we let them, they can reach into our current discussions on race and they can inform, soften, and change our often hard edged views. 

Forty-six years-ago my grandfather risked his life to explain what it felt like to be on the receiving end of racism.  He paid dearly for his words.  His statement aired once, around the country no less, but still only once.  And then it was over.  White residents of Greenwood credit him for bringing the civil rights movement home to them, but I’ll never know if my grandfather was aware of how much of a difference his words made in his town. 

Today, in 2012, we’re in trouble when it comes to talking about race.  Many times if a black person says, “Hey, I think that kid may have been murdered because he was black,” many will accuse the black person of playing the race card, of having some sort of chip on their shoulder, or of simply rushing to judgment too quickly. 

If a white person says about the same crime that they think it had nothing to do with race, very loud voices in the black community will come out and accuse that person of being insensitive to race issues or worse, being a racist themselves.  It’s amazing to me to think that after so many years of dealing with race-based issues in America that it’s still so hard for us to even have the dialogue without hitting below the belt.  We make it personal.  We attack a person’s character instead of their argument. 

Booker Wright went on camera and with detail and vulnerability described the heartache he experienced every time that he went to work in the white’s only restaurant where he was a waiter.  He explained how it made him want to cry on the inside.  He described how when whites got angry with him and hurled racial slurs at him that he simply wondered what else he could do to appease them. 

Sharing our shame can be hard.  It’s hard to describe the moments in life when we’re the butt of the joke.  It’s hard to tell people about how we’ve been abused, demeaned, or disregarded.  Exposing our wounds weakens us, so we don’t do it.  We especially don’t do it on national television.  Booker Wright went against the grain.  In doing so, he debunked the myth of the angry black person.  He is our evidence that before there was anger there was hurt.  Underneath the loud cries and the screaming voices are a people who simply want to be embraced.  

"My wound is geography." - Conroy

Sometimes I don't blog because I feel like I can't tell the whole truth.  I try lots and lots of different ways to write things that are provocative but that won't get me in trouble, but I really don't know how to write like that.

I am leaving soon to go to New York City for 11 days.  Our film is premiering at the Tribeca Film Festival.  I'm doing TV, radio, and more.  I did a one hour interview with the NY Times a few weeks ago and another with the Amsterdam News last weekend.

But there is that pesky little problem, that theme that just won't rest.  Whenever I think I have a handle on it, it snaps back and knocks me in the face.  Family.

The Times reporter wanted to interview my Tornado.  When I called to ask her if she was interested in helping tell the story of the first man to ever love her, the man who met her every day when she walked home from school and swooped her up and swung her around and around in the air, when I asked her if she wanted to tell his story to the Times she said no and hung up on me.  Last summer she learned for the first time that I was molested.  Her only response was to accuse me of using that revelation to tarnish her image.  I know, she's broken.

It's always been like this.  I've had years and years of counseling over this.  It still hurts like hell.

So, why am I downcast tonight?  Because I am going to the premiere of my movie alone.  None of Booker Wright's children are coming.  I tried.  I cajoled.  I was turned down.  Dateline will be there to film me walking into the theater......alone.

This is the story, right?  It's because of stuff like this that I have a story at all.  My family is broken.  I honestly believe that members of my family experienced horrors in Greenwood that left them almost beyond repair.  By all appearances they look fine.  We all do.  But there is something in our family that alters us, traveling like a mark on an unsuspecting chromosome.  It makes us act like enemies when really we desire nothing more than one another's company.

Over and over again I ask myself if I'd lived their lives and the lives of my ancestors, what kind of a parent would I be?  If I was a man who knew that he could not protect his wife from rape or his children from being sold into slavery, could I ever give my heart to them?  Would I ever look into their sweet, unknowing eyes?  Would I ever even smile at them?  Would they be able to give their hearts to their own children? How many generations would have to pass for this to heal?

What if I was a black woman living in Greenwood where the only way out was for the right man to get me pregnant?  What if romantic love was a luxury that only white people got to indulge in?  What if I couldn't look for love, I could only look for economic security?  What kind of a family would I form with that man?

What if I lived in Greenwood in the 1960's as a sharecropper with too many mouths to feed?  My oldest children miss school to work the fields, their younger siblings miss school to care for their even younger siblings.  It's all I can do to make it through the day before falling into bed each night.  Every morning I wake up in a panic, wondering how I will feed my children.  I don't read books to them at night. We can't afford books and I don't have the energy.  When they do go to school, I don't understand their homework.  I don't think about how to create complex, deep character in them.  I don't teach them to love Sinatra or fret over which piano teacher will be best.  I just pray that the boys don't end up in jail and that the girls don't get pregnant.  That's all I've got, because I'm black and I'm from Greenwood.

This is the mark that stains us.  There's more of course.  Alcoholism, incest, and the like.  Children robbed of the innocence of their childhood, only to have it replaced by fear.  Then they grow up and have children of their own.  But no matter how far we stray one thing will always be true: We started out in Greenwood.

I left there when I was two, but I still seem to wear the mark.  Will my children wear the mark?  Will they read this and understand that each day that I parented them I was inventing it out of thin air?  Like trying to write a symphony with only a few music lessons to call upon.

Most of us have never contemplated or meditated on what it would feel like to be a grown black man who is called "boy" by a white child.  Most of us have never considered how a black waiter might feel every time he adopts an awkward high pitched voice and smiles the smile of the jolly negro so that he can keep his job. Consider this:  How does one live a humiliated life and then go home and give gifts of love and character to their children?

When I first learned that my grandfather was an unacknowledged civil rights figure, the first person I called, with tears and excitement, was someone in my family.  The next call was someone else in my family.  So was the next one and the one after that.  I felt so excited and so honored to be able to gift my family with a kind of celebration of him.  I felt like I had been called to tell his story.  Last year when we started making the film it felt like something bigger than me was making this whole thing possible.

For months I have imagined attending the premiere.  I always, always, always imagined that my dad, my mom, my aunt, my brother, and my children would all be there with me.  I imagined that we'd be high and giddy with joy - unable to contain our smiles.  I imagined that we'd feel special, together.  I am trying to hold onto the specialness of this vision, while letting go of everything else.  It's in moments like this that I wish celebrity and media meant more to me.  But they don't.

I long for my family.  I am 37 years old and I am still listening like an eager child for their congratulations.  But they won't be there.  I will be alone to celebrate a man that I never met who loved them desperately.  I guess it's fitting.  Booker and I started this journey alone - no one in my family knew about his appearance in Frank's doc - so, I'll finish it with him alone.  I will imagine myself holding Booker Wright's hand, while he whispers his thanks and congratulations to the little girl in me.

But this is the point, right?  This is the story, right?  It's entertaining, right?